


steadfast (the way to solo)

by the_garbage_will_do



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Dark, Dysfunctional Relationships, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Obsession, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Spoilers, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, hux's theatrical flair comes out to play and the results are appropriately catastrophic, it is in fact a break-it-further fic, this may look like a fix-it fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:22:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21995182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_garbage_will_do/pseuds/the_garbage_will_do
Summary: Hux lived to outdo Ren.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 4
Kudos: 50





	steadfast (the way to solo)

**Author's Note:**

> According to the new Episode IX visual dictionary, the burning remnants of Starkiller Base are canonically nicknamed "Solo."

Once Pryde strides away Hux pushes himself off the floor, mildly offended that he’s deemed so easy to kill. Pryde's blaster bolt has ripped a hole in his uniform, and the armored breastplate underneath sizzles a seething red. 

Hux has worn armor since the first time he saw Kylo Ren crumple a console panel with a single glance. 

He tears off the shirt, peels off the smoking armor and runs in only a bloodied black undershirt. In the chaos of the latest Resistance attack he goes unnoticed. He nearly starts to bark out orders, to demand attention and organize his troops for the counterattack—

Yet they are no longer his troops. His loyalties split when Ren’s did.

An explosion. The floor tilts and sends Hux sliding downwards while alarms resound around him, and as the battle commences he’s reminded of meeting Ren for the first time, how the torn fringe of Ren’s cowl and the wry tilt of his mask sent him flying. Life around Ren was an eternal freefall, and though Hux twisted and struggled he never did escape his gravitational pull.

Hux catches himself, hand snagging on a protruding table leg. Carefully he lowers himself onto a now-horizontal wall and gets to his feet, elegantly reorienting himself in a world turned sideways. He carries on, dodging the troopers who hurtle down around him. One trooper he grabs mid-fall, stealing their jet pack and then dropping them again through a doorway. He steals their fire and steps through the door, off the ledge of its frame, diving headlong into the chaos of the room below him. Ren is below him on the planet’s surface, Ren is waiting on Exegol and with him at their head, the Resistance will win. Ren— "Ben Solo"— will surely win.

And so Hux tore out his own heart this past year. He turned traitor. He abandoned the Order in favor of the so-called “light side.” Even as he lost the Order’s throne, he resolved to match Ren in aiding the Resistance. 

He lives to outdo Ren.

Hux has watched him carefully, and so he knows Ren will defect on Exegol. Whether for the girl or for the cause, Hux can’t tell and doesn’t care— he will follow Ren. Together they will strike down this Emperor who dares claim their victory, and together they will reinvent themselves as Resistance war heroes and live on another eon. Hux holds this truth in his bones, that he and Ren will live together and die together, blade or saber jammed in the other’s ribs, hands warm around each other’s throat.

The ship’s exterior burns up in the atmosphere, and lightning crackles too close for comfort. Hux breathes in smoke and ozone and forces his eyes open, shoots his way through ceilings and walls and flies through the smoldering holes. He knows this design. There are TIE fighters in the _Steadfast’s_ hangar three levels below him, and he will commandeer one as his own and make his way back to Ren, navigate through the haze and the wreckage to get back to Ren—

.

Hux wakes in the ashes of the _Steadfast_ , ringed by warped red-hot metal and alive.

Ren is not.

.

Waiting on Exegol, he grabs onto the reports, the rumors planted by the Resistance and the distress calls sent up by Order ships all through the galaxy. He waits for Ren to steal up behind him in that absurd mask, its broken edges seared red. He waits for Ren to wrap one hand about his neck and threaten him for his treachery and whisper all his hatred, all his blinding rage into Hux’s waiting ear.

Ren is gone.

In his place remains a smoking hole in Hux’s worldview, tearing through the fundaments and dragging the whole structure down. Hux ignores the flailing Order’s pleas, the scattered army that he could unite once more under his own command if he cared. His world overturns itself, somersaults beneath his feet. He falls.

Though Ren is gone, Solo remains. The thought catches in Hux’s throat, splits him to the bone with hysterical laughter.

Hux had meant it as a joke. Knowing full well Ren would trace it back to him, he had renamed the remnants of Starkiller “Solo,” popularizing the term among his troops. They thought it a bit of scientific shorthand, a reference to how the base had collapsed into a stellar “singularity.”

Ren had guessed the truth.

Hux had meant it as an insult. Solo was a beacon blazing to remind Ren of how he had failed, how the wreckage of his past self had stolen defeat from the jaws of victory. Solo’s coordinates are branded in Hux’s head too, the way to the base he had erected with all his passion. His own life’s work, now in flames and branded with Ren’s name. 

An eternal monument to their entwined failures.

Hux clears a path to the _Steadfast’s_ hangar. From the wreckage he salvages a TIE fighter, tending to its damage, replacing its broken parts with others from the fleet, oddly gentle in his loneliness.

They say Ren faded away quietly. Hux hates the thought of it, the uncharacteristic lack of theatricality, and resolves to outdo him one last time.

He steps into his ship.

Ren is gone, but Solo burns for him still in the depths of the Unknown Regions, a red-hot gash in the void of space that splits physics to the bone. Slowly it swallows up the galaxy around it, brilliant and infinitely ravenous. It is both pyre and mausoleum, and its gravitational pull is inescapable.

Hux sets the coordinates. 

Closes his eyes. 

Jumps to lightspeed.


End file.
